true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
PREFACE
SOMETIME DURING THE EARLY 1980s, while visiting the Esalen Institute, where I had been invited to participate in a conference on
shamanism, I realized that my innate Irish ability to rave had been turbo-charged by years of psilocybin mushroom use. Aided by my devotion
to psilocybin and the experiment at La Chorrera that is the subject of this book, I had apparently evolved into a sort of mouthpiece for the
incarnate Logos. I could talk to small groups of people with what appeared to be electrifying effect about the peculiarly transcendental matters
that you will read about in these pages.
These verbal performances seemed to me rather mundane while they were occurring, but relistening to them on audiotape I could see the
source of other people's fascination. It was as though my ordinary, rather humdrum personality had simply been turned off and speaking
through me was the voice of another, a voice that was steady, unhesitating, and articulate—a voice seeking to inform others about the power
and the promise of psychedelic dimensions.
Dozens, now perhaps nearly a hundred, of my talks and lectures were recorded, distributed, sometimes pirated, passed among friends, and
played on small underground radio stations. I began to make my living as a lecturer and teacher at various spas and growth centers. I was
discovered by the notorious Roy of Hollywood, whose late-night radio show made me an underground mini-star, at
least among the insomniacs of Los Angeles. Merely by talking about the events at La Chorrera I had become a minor celebrity.
Eventually rumor of my status as a raver and a West Coast underground figure reached even into the great glass boxes along Fifth Avenue in
Gotham itself. Publishers that I had imagined would not give me the time of day were suddenly interested in my work. Let us hope that as you
read this, my books—this one and others that have preceded it—are spreading these strange ideas and making my life comfortable and others
rich.
There is a strange paradox surrounding all of this: my ideas are now in the public arena and an informal plebiscite is being held on them. If
they spread, become popular, and function as catalysts of social change then the hope that they may have a special destiny will be sustained.
If, on the other hand, they have their moment in the sun and then fade from public notice, my work and my vision will have been judged to be
no more than another fleeting facet of our surreal and paranoia-infected culture. I have no idea where these ideas may lead. Certainly with
several books now in print I cannot claim that I was not given a fair hearing. It is apparently the public who will decide if this phenomenon
has run its course or if it is only beginning to make itself felt.
I mention all of this not to inform my reader of the less-than-interesting details of my personal effort to feed a family, but because this career
of mine is now the only and best evidence that something extraordinary, perhaps something of historical importance, may have happened at
La Chorrera. For the loquacious mushrooms encountered there have spun a myth and issued a prophecy, in quite specific detail, of a planetsaving
global shift of consciousness. They have promised all that has happened in my life over the last twenty years, and they have promised
much more for the future. If you read onward you become a part of this tale. Caveat lector.
CHAPTER ONE
THE CALL OF THE SECRET
In which our cast of characters, including a mushroom, are introduced, and their peculiar interests sketched. The Amazon jungle is invoked
and the descent of one of its rivers undertaken.
For THOUSANDS OF YEARS the visions imparted by hallucinogenic mushrooms have been sought and revered as a true religious mystery.
Much of my thought over the past twenty or more years has been caught up in describing and contemplating this mystery. Closely guarded by
the chaotically jeweled Angels— "Every angel is terrible," wrote Rilke, and at once sacred and profane—the mushroom has risen in my life
much as it may rise at some future point in human history. I have chosen a literary approach to the telling of this tale. A living mystery could
take any shape—it is master of place and space, time and spirit—yet my search for a simple form to convey this mystery brought me to follow
tradition: to write a chronological narrative of a story that is both true and extraordinarily bizarre.
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